Practical Aspects of Polygamy –the benefits polygamy has for women and the controls it places on men

Vital Statistics – Polygamy and Gender Ratios

More Vital Statistics – Polygamy, Gender Ratios and the Church

Practical Aspects of Polygamy

Benefits

Automatic childcare in a sexist society gives women more effective choice to have a career without devaluing the role of homemaker.

Being able to marry men who are already married means that women can marry men who have already proved themselves, therefore minimising their risk.

Being able to marry the men who attract most women means they don’t have to settle just for what’s left after other women have the best pickings.

Having the possibility that a husband can remarry without divorce extends practical security to a woman. She needn’t worry about losing her husband and income as she loses her looks, because if her husband is attracted by a younger woman, he doesn’t even have to think about leaving his wife.

Polygamy removes the pressure on a husband to commit adultery, and removes damaging deceit from a marriage.

Polygamy provides a method where a woman can have a female friend for life as well as a husband.

Polygamy therefore provides more people and a better chance of meeting diverse needs.

Polygamy provides a potential for at least three adult incomes, reducing state dependance and the fear of unemployment.

Controls

If a man wants to have another sexual partner in a polygamous system then he has to meet his responsibilities – pay for any children produced from all his relationships without priority being given to those from a ‘legal’ relationship.

Polygamy removes or reduces the seduction of innocent young women – If a man promises to marry her, he cannot use his existing marriage as an excuse for not fulfilling a promise.

Polygamy reduces the number of women who are available. Currently, with more women than men, this ‘cheapens’ women. With less women available their ‘value’ goes up. In other words, polygamy makes men have to try harder and do better with women if they are to win them in competition with other men.

Vital Statistics about Polygamy

An email to this page alleged “in the western world, there are barely more women than men; it is essentially 50/50”. Such a view is untrue and misleading. The reply is printed below so that people may be able to appreciate the negative side of enforced monogamy.

You cannot have it both ways – it is either equal or there is a surplus. There is no way a surplus is ‘essentially’ 50/50. The truth is that the size of the excess varies from country to country. Left on its own there is a statistically significant excess of women. The surplus is actually greater than a first examination of statistics will show – as an excess of young boys is quickly turned into a surplus of females due to differential mortality rates.

For your information, my examination of the official statistics for 1994 in the United Kingdom shows that a population of 58.4 million people breaks down into 28.6 million males and 29.8 million females. In other words there were 1.2 million more females than males in the United Kingdom at this time. That represents a male:female split of 49:51 (with the male ratio rounded UP to 49).

If you just count those above marriageable age (which is sensible when you are talking about marriage) there are 22.31 million males and 23.84 million females. That is a surplus of 1.53 million females. The ratio is then 48.34 males to 51.66 females – closer to a 48:52 ratio.

This introduces competition when men are restricted to one wife. Any surplus combined with monogamy has a tendency to increase the size of the effective surplus. It goes like this…

If the numbers are 49:51 that means that there is a 2 per cent surplus. This means that 4.08 per cent of the female population cannot marry if they want to. (According to the British figures it is actually 6.41 per cent of women above the legal age of marriage). If they are determined it means they have to find a married man and separate him from his wife. Otherwise, in their competition with other single women they just have to offer a better deal – which may often simply mean sex without marriage. Other women will just play the game differently – rather than marriage they will find another way of obtaining support from men – prostitution.

This means that, in an allegedly monogamous society, men do not have to marry to get sex, or even female companionship. They can have prostitutes from the excess of women. They can have casual sex with the competing single women, and if they do get married they needn’t be faithful because they still remain the target of that 4.08 per cent (or higher) of the female population who are forced to be single.

Therefore, if a man does not need marriage for sex he is less inclined to get married – so the fact of an insistance on monogamy works against itself. Men don’t need to get married – they can carry on being single – and this means that less men are in fact available for marriage. This in turn means that an even greater section of the female population cannot get married, and therefore faces the choice between fornication, adultery or prostitution, and so the vicious circle continues.

And to these facts must be added a couple of other variable factors. Firstly, the surplus of women increases as they get older. But, in general, women tend to marry men slightly older than themselves – usually around 2-4 years older on average. Thus, even if their own age cohort has a 49:51 split, the market that they are in is likely to be a 48:52 split. In such an example, 8.33 per cent of women cannot get married, without the extra complicating features. And when they try their own age or younger men they are competing against younger, more attractive, more fertile, women.

Secondly, the figures are complicated by the ‘impressions’ that the facts create. A significant excess of women over the number of desirable men puts them into competition even before they are of marriageable age. Once that has happened, the actual figures do not tell the whole story, as the process has a dynamic of its own.

Further figures show a higher rate of both marriage and cohabitation by men. These show that :-

32 per cent of 22.31 million men are without partner (i.e. 7,139,200 approx)

39 per cent of 23.84 million women are without a partner ( i.e. 9,297,600 approx)

Giving a surplus of 2,158,400 women, or 9.05 per cent of the female population above marriageable age and 23.2 per cent of women who are old enough to have a partner but do not in fact have one.

The bare figures therefore show that while the general population follows a 49:51 ratio, this works out at over 9 per cent of all adult women and almost a quarter of single adult women who cannot marry in a monogamous society.

By the means outlined above a seemingly small excess of women can have a large effect on society. The availability of polygamy works against this – and so it is unsurprising to note that polygamous societies have historically had lower rates of fornication, adultery, prostitution and abortion than our own.

polygamypage.com has maintained for some time that small differences in gender ratios in the general population work out as large differences in the single population, and that this effect is exaggerated in the church. We now have the first statistical evidence for what has been, until now, a theoretical proposition.

According to research by Christian Research, in the average church congregation in the UK, single women outnumber single men by more than two to one. A report in Christianity magazine says that churchgoing women are being forced to stay single because they cannot find partners who match their high moral standards. And the situation does not improve as they get older.

By the age of 40 there are as many as four single women to every single man in church, and by the age of 50 this becomes six single women to every single man.

Inevitably, many of the men who are left unmarried at this stage have been left that way for a reason. So not even all these men are seen as good husband material, meaning that the ratio for women is effectively much worse. Many Christian women are turning to dating agencies, but even this cannot change the fact that the numbers are against them.

This can lead to women being tempted to look outside the church and to marry non-Christians, and anecdotal evidence shows that this pattern is repeated throughout the world, and is much worse for women in some other countries, including Malaysia.

But still, many Christians refuse to acknowledge the role of the Biblical practice of polygamy in ensuring that Christian women not only have Christian husbands available but that they can have good and proven husbands and fathers.

The teaching of mandatory monogamy has resulted in Christian women being tempted away from the faith, the introduction of sexual immorality and the denial of basic human experiences such as being married and becoming a mother. The prophet Isaiah said of the last days that “in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, ‘We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach.” (Isaiah 4 v 1)